Chapter VII: Section 12: of the Prevention of Crime Act, 1908, gives power to the

Secretary of State to commute in certain cases to Preventive Detention. An Advisory Committee could fitly advise as to the occasion for the exercise of this power.

3. In addressing the Central Committee of Aid Societies last year, I ventured to propose the foundation of a National Society for the Prevention of Crime. I was led to this proposal by the experience which has come to me in watching the operation of the great network of effort now employed in diverse capacities throughout the country, not only in the aid of prisoners discharged from ordinary or local prisons, but in the supervision of Borstal, Penal Servitude, and Preventive Detention cases through the admirable machinery of the Borstal and Central Associations. In addition to these recognised, and more or less State-aided, instruments for dealing with the actual offender, we have the preventive agencies for the supervision of cases discharged from Industrial and Reformatory Schools, as well as the large field of care and tutelage for those placed on Probation,--all these methods for after-care and prevention are co-ordinated with the help given by other benevolent or religious Societies, thus forming a compact whole of altruistic effort of what is known in France as '_Patronage_', or a National life-saving apparatus.

My idea was to stabilize and unify all this somewhat unconnected effort by the formation of a Central Council, on which all persons or societies working in the field of reclamation, either of young or of old, could be brought, so to speak, under 'one umbrella'.

There would be Committees of such Central Council in every selected area or district, on which would be represented the local Aid Society, the local Probation officer, the Associate of the Borstal and Central Associations, agents of the Reformatory and Industrial School Department, and any local representatives for dealing with the care and employment of the young.

To such a body would be affiliated the associations which exist in many parts of the country for the care of the mentally defective.

There is a growing appreciation on the part of Magistrates, and the public generally, of the close and often undiscovered association between crime and mental deficiency. Steps are now being taken, notably in the Midlands and the North of England, for establishing a co-operation between the Police Authority, the Courts of law, and Committees of the County Council, working under the Mental Deficiency Act. If such co-operation could become general throughout the country, a new and formidable 'preventive' against many acts of petty and repeated lawlessness would be created, and there is little doubt that many persons of both sexes who hitherto have spent their lives in and out of Prison--the despair of the Courts, a source of perpetual trouble to Police, and of nuisance to their neighbours, would, on inquiry, and mental observation, be found to be 'irresponsibles', and proper subjects for medical care, rather than the grim severity of ceaseless and useless imprisonment. The long and mournful roll of incurable recidivists would cease to haunt our prisons, and public places; and under Institutional care, would, at least, be removed from evil-doing, if they did not regain, under medical care, their opportunity for reinstatement in normal industrious life.

It is in these directions that I think that the hope of dealing effectively with the ever-present criminal problem lies. Let those who are anxious to get to the heart of this problem know that the solution lies, not in abstract theories of so-called Prison Reform: not in academical discussion of the best prison system to adopt: not in the old vexed controversies of the comparative value of the cellular or associated plan, but in patient observation of every human being, while in the custody of the State for an infraction of its laws, and in aiding the reconstruction of a life that has failed, by the adoption of a system of After-care, on the lines I have described, or, which is far better still, in endeavouring to create such a network of preventive work throughout the land, that, as a nation, we may rejoice in being able to feel that, at least so far as human effort can avail, Prison, with all its consequences, shall be the last and not the first resort, which, in the absence of well-organized preventive and curative measures, it has too often been in the past.